


the cross darkens the horizon

by chagrin



Series: (interlude) to the apocalypse [3]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Bleeding Effect, Gen, Psychological Trauma, even more psychobabble, is anyone surprised honestly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 14:24:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1188528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chagrin/pseuds/chagrin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His hopes ache to someday be redeemed. Comprehension, however, is relative, especially when it comes to the mentally unstable.  </p>
<p>Too much sanity was madness. Goddamn, goddamn, god bless.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the cross darkens the horizon

This was not how his life was supposed to turn out.

Something Cross has never told anyone, alive or otherwise: _he is well-acquainted with failure_. The fleshed-out hatred of loss, the decapitation of conviction for hypocrisy that claws at the throat in parasitical resuscitation, volt by volt; self-preservation for the proverbial sinner. Sentimentality was an idealized liability, counterintuitive to the rat race of Darwinian survival, and _goddamn_ , he wanted to live so fucking _badly_. Jumping through hoops didn’t even graze the tip of moralistic deviancy. He would’ve set himself aflame and renounced his allies if it went in favor of his collective agenda.

Giving two shits on the affected social politics of ~~waspish~~ _sacred_ wars millenniums in the making was within his scope, at least. The thrills of the culminating hunt bottoming out to a habitual brutality that bordered on sadism. Cross was an unkind man. His ego was only another pretext for vainglorious self-absorption.

It only made proper sense that it’d inherently end like this, to some bastard with a Messianic complex, like psychotic breaks were all a part of the great schema of existence (the life and times of the mentally unsound, chalked down to the threadbare husks of hypotheticals).

After all, the devil’s in the details. He’s not so far above reproach to act on instinct alone. Being evasive was for pussies with one foot already off the deep-end and the gutless cowards of hierarchal subjugation. Daniel’s always been meant for better things, a high-maintenance victor in the bluntest sense. As an inimitable winner, for one thing; he is the conqueror, the ultimate ideal, nonpareil to any martyring guilt in sobering autonomy. He lives solely for the highs, swapping substance abuse for a holier-than-thou brazenness. If it was a dissipating falsehood, he swallowed it of his own resolve, bleached clean of sanctimony.

Cross believed only in himself.

Through that context, it was easier to process hostile confrontations. It made things regurgitate onto themselves. A world of difference from compassion, or woebegone sympathy, or truth, just as it was – when everything morphed into a lie, he was incontrovertibly **_real_**. That notion alone kept him grounded to reality. Even when insanity became second-nature to his limbs, distorted the brittle stability over his composure and addled his mind, _he still remained_. It didn’t impede the madness, but as validation for a brand of mental solipsism, it worked.

_“Speaking of which … it’s the 21st century and you’re still running around with only a tiny knife for protection? It’s stupid. Alright, Desmond. Game’s over.”_

Nothing else awaits either of them. Not the Assassins. Not the Templars. No one.

When the low hits, Daniel’s already flipped off the safety on the handgun, aimed to dispense a barrage of riddling bullet holes into _farm boy_ (the very same kid he conveyed to Vidic’s custody only months ago, an ironic housewarming gift for his surrogate custodian, in retrospect).

Rikkin would’ve popped a vessel at the shambolic ambiguity of it all, had he been there to chide them both on the aesthetics of homicide decorum. There wasn’t enough melodramatic gloating occurring. The schmaltzy interlude was ostensibly absent in their encounter, only to be replaced by a hideously philistine exchange. Shame on them for being _such_ uncultured swine. _Whatever._

But his lucidity snapped open a long time ago. All things considered, there was never an escape to begin with, whether from himself or anyone else.

**_Вы видели бездну._ **

Daniel instantly lurches away, mouth warped into a scalded grimace, spine transposed from ramrod straight posture to a feverish shuddering of shoulders and point-by-point vertebrae.

“… Not now. _Not now._ **Там еще многое предстоит сделать.** ”

Что же вы ждете? Вы что, оглохли? Отпустите нас. Отпустите нас!

Their voices are sonorous through the hollows of his bones, wishbone thin, rusted over with accusatory resentment. Cross’s DNA goes putridly caustic with poltergeists, an arterial spread of dereliction that starts at the synapses and rinses straight through bloodlines. 

In lieu of immortality, debilitation; he was once considered a savior to the two opposing factions he joined, but more so now a scapegoat with a knack for being an irresolvable anathema.

And he runs. Печать Каина заклеймен на спине.

A Templar eulogy under oath:

_Daniel Cross was one heartless prick, but he almost could’ve been somebody else in another life. Who knows. Maybe even someone worth the trouble. Cheers. Remember to pray for his soul burning in the fires of everlasting damnation on your way out. He’ll need all the condolences he can get._ _Аминь! Аминь!_

Существует дымный огонь в его легких. Gallows humor for the boorishly illiterate; his thoughts are incoherent, fleeting wisps against his cerebrum. Он боится святой воды. Так боятся.

_“Get out of my **head** , Kenya.”_

**Сохраните наш сын! Экономьте свое солнце! Пожалуйста. Ты должен! Это ваше право по рождению!**

_S-s-screaming._ All the time, begging to be released.

Daniel Cross was the caricature of a hero, of a villain, spanning over the capillaries of faulted, vantage point sermons and fluorescent indoctrination, the juggernauts of Templar dogma. The satire was tangible.

He laughed for such a damn long time on the bleak morbidity of it all, a hard, asphyxiating kind of laughter, plaintive and bitter, because he’d just walked away from taking a dagger between the ribs and his organs were deflating inside of him.

Walked. Away.

God, it was such a shitty way to die, his lungs punctured six ways to Sunday and the knife jump-starting ruptured contortions in his torso where Subject 17 had made certain to twist it in, and his heart had collapsed, already gone into fibrillating spasms, and Jesus Christ, _Jesus Christ_ , that was foul play. 0/10. He wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

“ _F-f-fuck,_ this is bull! I should’ve … killed y-you back _then_ , kid.” Subject 4 spat the words as serrated knives, steel snap-tangled in his trachea, and slumped back against the wall, his mortality declining, plodding through his veins downstream.

Miles’s eyes were sloe-dark, nacreous, the refraction of a cold, brilliant night in Tuscany and Rome. His approach was measuredly slow, and he pinned Cross with relative ease.

The stillness between them was inexorable.

The Templar pries his mouth open to speak, to ad-lib his final words in halting closure. (“Вы добрались, чтобы жить своей жизнью. Они никогда не дадут мне жить моей.”) Only blood wells in his throat, however, the devil incarnate at his tongue. The conjectural guillotine is suspended over his head in emotional catharsis, and Cross’s frustration and hysteria coagulate in tandem. He swallows falteringly, attempts to articulate clearly through the death throes of exsanguination.

_"Вам повезло сын сука.”_ This time, it sticks. Everything stutters in tempo after that, voices slurring together against the harsh vivisection of red smearing his abdomen, and Daniel Cross can see all that was, all that will ever be in the mottling darkness.

_"Yeah."_ The Assassin’s features are severe, unaffected, inflectionless. The blade at his wrist morphs into the blade at the Templar’s throat with nothing left to say, no discernible reason to draw it out any longer. _"I know."_

And it aches.

.

The voices were silenced.

**Author's Note:**

> So much wasted potential.


End file.
